Picklebacks and Mountweazels

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Some words and phrases you just love to hate.

How about, do you mind if I put you on hold?

I mean, of course I mind.

Or how about this one?

Your call is important to us.

No, it’s not.

If you really cared, I wouldn’t be on hold.

And Grant, I think this is the one that really gets my goat.

How about, this is a courtesy call.

I mean, how courteous is it to call me during dinner?

To interrupt at all, actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s not just the word sometimes, but it’s the voice, right?

Your call is important to us.

That woman, that one voice.

Yeah, there’s something so condescending and smarmy and oily about it.

Yeah, there was a column in the New York Times by Stanley Fish where he talks about some of these things that we hate to hear.

He thinks sold out is one of those things.

I think sold out is pretty bad, particularly if you’ve been expecting whatever it was that’s sold out, right?

Well, yeah, if you were the last person in the line and you get to the window and then, boom, that sign goes up.

A register closed.

You rush down 15 aisles in the supermarket thinking you found the one short line, and it turns out that the register is closed.

Yeah, yeah.

There’s just 13 to have one last customer.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

What’s the common theme here?

I think the common theme is defeated expectations.

You expect better service or you’re expected some kind of great circumstance and you didn’t get it.

Yeah, I agree.

All right, so what words and phrases really get to you?

Which are the ones that really make you cringe?

We’d love to hear about it.

Call us at 1-877-929-9673, or you can send your rants to words@waywordradio.org.

We’ll be happy to read them.

And you can tweet them on Twitter to the username WayWord.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha.

This is Terry calling from San Diego.

Hello, Terry.

Hello, Terry.

How are you doing?

I am doing great.

It is sunny and beautiful here.

That’s great, and I hear a smile in your voice, too.

Well, I’m happy to be on the line with you, too.

Well, same here.

What’s up?

Well, I grew up in the Midwest, and we have all kinds of idioms and colloquialisms, as you know,

In that neck of the woods.

And we frequently hear a phrase that got me thinking a little bit called raring to go.

Oftentimes when we’re about to take the dogs on a walk,

My little Chesapeake Bay retriever will rear up on her hind legs and be really eager to take that walk.

And it got me thinking about being a visual person, the fact that maybe the phrase is actually rearing to go and not rearing to go.

And I’m wondering what you two thought about that.

That’s a really good guess because rearing is a variant of the earlier form rearing.

And both of those words belong to the same linguistic family as the word raise.

And so you’re right, the whole idea here is raising.

Okay.

Well, being a visual person, I always envision this big steed rearing up on his two high legs

Before the Lone Ranger rides him off into the sunset to right some great injustice.

Exactly.

Or something’s rearing its ugly head, right?

It’s the same idea.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Well, I was polling a number of my friends about this.

We were very excited to have the opportunity to speak with you.

In fact, I guess you could say we were chompy as a bit to talk to you.

Or is it champing you two?

Both.

Can we get a twofer on this?

Both work.

Chomping and champing.

Depends on your dialect.

But isn’t the traditional…

Traditional schmitional.

We’d all be speaking Elizabethan English if that were the case.

Here, here.

Well, I have to ask the two of you then, because in polling my friends,

It was nearly 50-50, but the simple majority preferred raring to go.

And I’m curious what the two of you think.

I know that, Grant, you’re from the Midwest.

So what’s your opinion first?

And then, Martha, I’d love to hear yours.

Yeah, but you know that she’s turning the table.

She’s interviewing us.

This is strange.

Yeah, I’m raring to be interviewed.

I’m raring to be interviewed.

I’ve got to tell you, though, I’m not a good sample for your survey because I’m—

For anything.

No, really.

I’m contrarian and obstinate and not willing to cooperate with just about anyone.

No, all my language is polluted by my studies in linguistics.

Seriously.

He’s a stinking cesspool of lexical content.

I’m a cesspool.

But I think Martha’s got the same problem.

We analyze our own speech too much, and we affect it based upon what we learn.

But both are fine.

Rearing and rearing are 100% okay.

But I think if you Google them, you’ll find rearing is much, much more common.

Rearing? R-A-R-I-N-G?

Yeah, especially in this country.

It’s more of a U.S. Locution than British.

I think there’s definitely some semantic separation there.

I think a lot of people don’t connect rearing to rearing.

They don’t think of the stallion with its legs in the air trying to take off after the bad guy.

They don’t see that.

Yeah, but Terry, you did.

Why are you such a visual person?

Are you an artist?

No, I actually work in the realm of solar energy.

The realm of solar energy.

I had an aunt who planted the seeds of linguistics and a love of grammar eons ago back in Ohio.

And I just like to speak with a little bit of humor and a little more to paint a picture, I suppose, like the two of you do on a regular basis.

Oh, I see.

Well, John Dunn, you’ve done it today.

Yeah, I’m definitely getting a visual of her planting the linguistic seed and then Grant and me adding manure.

And it’s just blossoming forth.

But that only brings richer fruits for our fertile minds, right?

There we go.

Richer fruits for our fertile minds.

Man.

Or else just a good chutney.

Now, what about the chomping, champing thing?

Is there a possibility I can sneak that two for in?

No, yeah.

Like I said, they’re both fine.

Chomping and champing are both fine.

Yeah, but the traditional one is champing, right?

Traditional.

Traditional.

Terry, thank you for calling today.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Well, if you and your friends are sitting around talking about language and a question comes up,

Why not call us?

1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Louise. I’m in Rancho Bernardo, a suburb of San Diego.

Hi, Louise. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a complaint.

Did we say something wrong?

Let me transfer you to the right department.

Is your subscription not arriving every week?

Oh, it’s on time every week.

Okay, good, good. All right. Well, what is your complaint, Louise?

My complaint is that people who otherwise appear to be professional and literate

Will come up occasionally in print with a term like mother-in-laws

Or brother-in-laws or sister-in-laws,

And that just rubs me the wrong way.

It rubs you the wrong way.

So they should be saying mothers-in-law or brothers-in-law or sons-in-law instead, right?

You got it.

They’re pluralizing the wrong word.

Yes, what’s the matter?

Louise, let me ask you, how come you’re so sure?

I don’t know, because it just looks like it makes sense.

To say mother’s-in-law?

Yes.

Well, you know what? You’re right.

Well, you know, if you say mother-in-laws, I get a mental picture of this woman in a cap and gown and a diploma coming along wrapped in scrolls of laws.

It doesn’t look right to me until you say mothers.

With the blindfold and the balance hanging from her hand?

Right.

Oh, boy, what a mental picture.

So what do you picture when you picture mothers-in-law?

Oh, she’s a nice lady.

Of course she is.

And there’s several of them.

Mothers-in-law.

Yes.

I have friends who are mothers-in-law.

Mm—

And brothers-in-law.

Mm—

Et cetera.

Are any of them attorneys at law?

Are sergeants at arms?

That’s right.

Are any of them attorneys general?

Are any of them poet’s laureate?

Not yet.

Even better.

Not yet.

Are any of them secretaries of the interior?

But you’re right on the money, Louise.

It’s important to pluralize the first word in these compounds.

So mothers-in-law and sons-in-law and brothers-in-law, that’s the correct way to do it.

That’s wonderful to know so that I can continue to bang on my desk.

Yes.

We all have to have something that keeps us awake in the morning, right?

That’s right.

Well, this was better than coffee.

Oh, it’ll wake me up right away.

All right. Thank you so much for calling, Louise.

All right. Congratulations. You’re right.

Take care.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.

What has you pounding your fist on the desk?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

This is Wendy Volker from Clifton Park, New York.

Hello, Wendy.

Hi, Wendy. How are you doing?

I’m great. How are you guys?

Super duper.

Fabulous.

Good, good.

I am calling you about an expression that my grandfather used to use.

Oh, yeah?

He was a police officer and therefore used many colorful expressions,

But most of them are not suitable for broadcast.

But this particular one is the term Jakeybum.

Jakeybum.

Jakeybum.

And I’m assuming that the spelling of Jakey is J-A-K-E-Y.

I know he used it to refer to undesirables that would hang out in the park, that kind of thing.

And no one in my family knows where the phrase originated, came from, but he used to use it a lot.

And so your question then is, what does Jakey mean?

Why did your grandfather start using it?

Right.

Well, when he called somebody a Jakey bum, was he referring specifically to people who showed signs of drunkenness or alcoholism?

You know, I don’t, I can’t say for 100%, but it seems very likely.

Because Jakey as an adjective usually means drunk or showing signs of withdrawal from alcohol addiction,

Such as the delirium tremens or the shakes, the jitters, or even the Jake’s or the Jake leg.

The Jake leg is to have those terrible full body shakes that happen when your body wants alcohol and doesn’t get it.

And it’s got an interesting little backstory, which is around the time of Prohibition,

There was a very famous case of a type of, I believe it was Jamaican rum.

It could be a different alcohol, but a type of alcohol that was poisonous.

There was some problem in the production, and it caused blindness, paralysis,

And all kinds of bodily mishaps, such as the shakes and the jitters.

And I believe the brand name had something to do with the word Jake, a Jake foot perhaps.

And so this was widely known.

A lot of people were injured by this.

The story, of course, spread much further than the poisoning itself did.

And so you might describe somebody who’s had too much alcohol as being Jakey,

Or if they have the shakes that are caused by withdrawal from alcohol,

Say that they have the Jake’s or the Jake leg.

It goes back to the 1930s or so.

I’m not surprised that your grandfather as a cop knew it

Because it’s very much a part of a certain kind of slang having to do with the people who deal with alcoholics

Or deal with people who have alcohol problems in general.

So somebody who’s Jakey drank too much Jake, in other words.

Yeah, well, Jake is a generic synonym for alcohol. It also exists as well.

It’s much less common today. These days, Jake is a completely different word.

It’s etymologically distinct, but to say something’s Jake would mean it’s okay or it’s great.

Oh, I haven’t heard that one either. I guess I learned two things today.

Great. I wish my grandfather was around that I could confirm that with him, but it sounds pretty right to me.

Thanks so much for your call today, Wendy.

Well, thank you.

All right. Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

If you have a question about something one of your grandparents used to say, call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette, and joining us once again is our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

John, qué tal?

Hey, Martha. Hi, Grant. How are you guys doing?

How are you, kid? What’s up?

Doing well.

I got a quiz for you guys, by the way.

All right. Let’s hear it.

Yeah. This quiz involves wordplay and novels. I call it Novel Novels. All right?

Okay.

I’ve taken the titles of several famous novels and changed but one letter, forming a new title.

I’ll give a brief description of the new plot line of the new novel thus created.

For example, if I said, migrant workers angrily attempt to get their professor to change a D- to a C, what novel might that describe?

Grades of Wrath?

Grades of Wrath. Very good.

If you need, I will give you the author, the original author of the book.

But I think you guys will do pretty well.

Okay.

Here are some more.

This curious novel is a sort of Billy Elliot for the royal crowd.

It tells how a British peer strove to become a ballet master.

A British peer.

So Lord something?

Yes.

Lord of the Wings?

No.

I don’t know either.

Well, think of a novel that stars Lord of the.

Lord of the Flies.

And change one letter to have to do something having to do with ballet.

Lord of the Flies.

Lord of the Pliets?

Very good.

Oh, my gosh.

That was good.

Actually, that was sort of a hard one, but you did great.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Oh, thank goodness for those ballet lessons in second grade.

That’s terrific.

This unusual novel about a chef deals primarily with baked goods and his generous use of yeast.

Raisins in the buns?

Oh, no, but you’ve got the two words I’m looking for, though.

Oh, we do?

Yeah, you’ve got the type of baked good, and you’ve got the action that yeast inspires.

Oh, rising bun.

So is it the Hemingway novel, then?

It is.

Oh, the bun also rises.

The bun also rises.

Very good.

You say House of the Rising Bun, but that’s a song, right?

Nice teamwork.

Yes, the animals, House of the Rising Bun.

All right, here’s the next one.

This offbeat novel is based on an incident concerning a nudist club and an official at a nearby university.

I was going to say Naked Bunch, but maybe something Dean?

Yes.

Dean and…

You’ve got the two, I think you’ve got the two words you need.

Can we have the clue again?

Sure, this novel based on an incident concerning a nudist club and an official.

Is this a Norman Mailer novel?

It is a Norman Mailer novel.

The Naked and the Dean?

The Naked and the Dean.

It’s very good.

Now, this strange Beat Generation novel is about warts,

And more specifically, where you might find them.

On the Toad.

On the Toad.

Very good, Grant.

Very good.

On the Toad by Jack Kerouac, yes.

Or Jack Jerouac.

You can change whatever you like here.

This peculiar novel tells how a baseball player touring a Russian seafood plant accidentally falls into a vat of caviar.

Okay, so Roe, a baseball player touring a Russian seafood plant.

Something in the row? Catcher in the row?

The Catcher in the Row.

This interesting novel is sort of the opposite of the TV show The Biggest Loser.

It’s about a domicile in which the occupants are encouraged to get fatter and fatter.

A little house.

A big house on the prairie?

No, they’re seeking to increase their circumference.

Is there something with bleak?

The author of the original was Edith Wharton, if that helps.

Oh.

Oh, the House of Girth.

House of Girth.

Here’s the next.

This abnormal novel concerns an Irishman and his strange obsession with a gardening tool.

Wait a minute.

Wait, an Irishman?

So gardening tool, hoe is funny.

Hoe is automatically funny, so maybe it involves a hoe.

Yeah, no, it’s not a hoe, though.

Oh, well, rake.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Can.

No.

No, no.

Rake is correct.

Rake is correct?

That’s right.

Okay, and it’s a weird Irish novel.

We just want to know, an Irishman obsessed with a gardening tool.

We just need an Irish name to go before rake.

Oh, right, right, right.

Finnegan’s Rake.

Finnegan’s Rake.

Very good.

Nice grant.

Now, here’s the last.

This atypical novel is about a clever con man

Who bilks unsuspecting people via the telephone.

Bilks.

Cheat?

Fraud?

No, you’re really looking for something having to do with clever and telephone.

Clever and telephone.

So call?

Yeah.

Call.

Call of the something.

Yeah.

Of the wily?

The call of the wily.

Call of the wily.

Nice, nice work.

These are great, John.

Cool, cool.

So those are my novel novels.

I hope you guys liked them.

You were great.

You did really, really well.

I thought they were hilarious.

Now you’ve got to get scribbling on the treatments.

On the treatments, yes.

You’ve got to send them out, yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe we can all do them together.

Good fun.

Thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

See you later.

All right.

And if you want to talk about words and how we use them,

Grammar, slang, any of that, call us, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi, this is Mark Sackler, and I’m calling from Woodbridge, Connecticut.

Welcome, Mark. What’s up?

Hi, Mark.

Well, what’s up is a word that’s been on my mind for probably over 30 years, believe it or not,

And that I’ve been looking for more information on, and until recently, it’s been a dead end,

And the possible answer I came to was so preposterous about a word that’s incredibly preposterous

That I wanted to put it to you guys and see if you could confirm or deny what I had found out.

Mark, this sounds really tantalizing.

Yeah, tell us the story.

Okay, so the story is back sometime in the 1970s.

I was in my 20s, and my friends and I were very enamored with the game of dictionary.

And we were playing at the house of an older friend.

She had a 1943 edition of Webster’s Unabridged New World Dictionary.

And again, I came across a word that was so preposterous that I never forgot it.

And the word was, and I couldn’t tell you for sure how to pronounce it, but it looks like junk tak, J-U-N-G-F-T-A-K.

Junk tak?

Yeah, or junk tak.

And there was no pronunciation with it or etymology.

All there was was the following definition.

It’s a Persian bird, the male of which has only one wing on the right side, the female only one wing on the left side.

And instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone, the female an eyelet of bone,

And it was by uniting the hook and the bone that they were enabled to fly.

Each one, when alone, had to remain on the ground.

My heavens.

Pretty amazing, yes.

So I didn’t forget this.

I went to the local library and, to my consternation, could find nothing.

I went to every dictionary, every encyclopedia.

I even looked for books on Persian mythology.

I figured this has to be mythological.

There’s no way there could be a real such creature.

I mean, nature is strange, but it’s not that bizarre.

And nothing.

Two or three months ago, I did yet another search.

I hadn’t thought about it in years.

I thought about it again.

I did a search, and I came across references to an article called

The Incredible Jung Fact, or Jung Fact, however you want to attack you, however you’re going to pronounce this,

Written by Richard Rex at the University of Utah.

It was a 1982 article, must have recently been transferred to Electronic Archive on the Internet.

He had gone through the same odyssey, had even gone so far as to look for something by this description

Under a different name and couldn’t find it, even wrote to the publishers of the New World Dictionary,

Which were now a new publisher, different publisher, they didn’t know.

It apparently only appeared in that one edition.

And what he came up with that startled me was that this is probably a bogus entry

That was either placed as a practical joke or more likely as a copyright trap to catch plagiarism.

And that, in fact, in subsequent research, I found that there’s even a term for such a thing,

Which has occasionally been used by dictionary or map publishers.

It’s called a modweasel.

So I’m asking you guys, you guys are the experts.

Can you confirm this?

Do you have any idea that there might be any other origin here?

My gosh, Mark, what a saga.

This is like Moby Yungftak or something, right?

The old man in the sea.

So this is an incredible story, and this is what dictionary makers do.

I think your conclusion and the conclusion of Richard Rex is probably correct.

This was an article in American Speech in the winter of 1982.

It probably was a Mount Weasel, although that’s a more recent term.

A Mount Weasel is an entry included in a dictionary so that any other dictionary maker who happens just to be stealing content will also include this fake entry and thereby be caught.

And it happens. It does happen.

The entries are included. People steal them. They are caught and things happen.

People lose jobs and are fired.

I know a lexicographer who lost a job because that person didn’t validate the content.

And as a matter of fact, I’ve written some Mount Weasels myself.

Oh, really?

Share your Mount Weasels.

Indeed, I cannot share them.

I won’t even tell you what dictionary they’re for.

Yeah, because you can’t, you know, you don’t want to give up the goat on that.

Occasionally they’re discovered and discussed.

A well-known recent one is one that appeared in the New Oxford American Dictionary.

You can find it on the OS X operating system, as a matter of fact, on the Macintosh.

In Mac, yeah.

Esquivalience, E-S-Q-U-I-V-A-L-I-E-N-C-E.

And that’s a mount weasel.

That’s a word that was invented just for copyright trap, and it actually did trap somebody.

There was a New Yorker article a few years ago, I think 2005, by Henry Alford that mentioned it.

You know, I guess after all this time, I’m sort of like relieved and fascinated by the answer,

But I guess I sort of feel a little ripped off after a 30-year wild goose chase, too.

Or a wild Persian bird case.

Wild Persian bird case, right.

I would say, Mark, that there’s still a little bit of work left to be done

If you want to finish your life with this puzzle.

See if you can track down the editor who put it in the Webster’s new 20th century dictionary from 1943.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was a fellow by the name of Barnhart,

But I’m not 100% sure of that.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

But, Mark, thank you for bringing up this really interesting little, I guess, sidecar of dictionary work,

It’s one of these strange little things that mapmakers and dictionary makers do to protect their copyrights.

Yeah, well, guys, thanks for having me on.

I love your show, and don’t take any wooden Mount Weasels.

We’ll do. Thank you, sir.

Thanks, Mark.

We should explain, by the way, what a Mount Weasel is and where it comes from.

And how it’s spelled.

And how it’s spelled. It’s M-O-U-N-T-W-E-A-Z-E-L.

And it came about because in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia,

The editors of that work included a fake entry for a woman supposedly by the name of Lillian Virginia Mountweasel,

Who was known for, among other things, her pictures of mailboxes that were published in a book called Flags Up.

And supposedly she died at age 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

And so this entry was indeed picked up and stolen by competitors.

They just stole the content and didn’t make it end.

And you get busted that way.

Right.

It’s like a little dictionary watermark.

So Mount Weasel has come to become the word that we use in the trade of dictionary making to describe a fake entry that we’ve made up.

I love it.

Poor little Mount Weasel.

Well, what is the most curious thing that you’ve come across in terms of language and speech and words and dictionaries

And all this strange mess of letters and sounds that we call language?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Send us your mysteries to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

Susan from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hi, Susan.

Hi, Susan.

Welcome to the program.

Thanks.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I married, I’m from the South, and I married a guy from just outside of New York City,

And he used to make fun of one of my sayings that my sister and I have used for years,

Might could.

-huh.

Now, how would you use that in a sentence?

Well, we might could go to the, we might could do that.

You know, we might could go to the fair tonight, or we might could go to dinner.

Mm—

And this Yankee’s making fun of you?

Yeah.

And how do you feel about that?

I just i’ve after a few years i’ve just laughed it off oh he’s still making fun of you for it

Actually i’ve curved my use of the saying somewhat have you really yes oh but occasionally

I caught to my sister and she says it and then i laugh because you know it’s it’s just something

That we’ve always said and i just always thought it was kind of funny i never thought about it

Until he pointed it out to me yeah funny how that happens with language right from somebody

Right.

When somebody from a different part of the country and you get together.

Yeah, I tell you what, I love this expression because it sounds like home.

My mother was from Virginia.

-huh.

Yeah, and it’s what linguists call a double modal, and that’s M-O-D-A-L.

Those are verbs that express possibility or necessity.

And those are words like can and could and ought to and may and might.

And it is something that pretty much brands you as a son or daughter of the South.

I might could go to the movies with you or something like that.

Grant, I think it’s an expression that’s stigmatized outside of the South.

I think unfairly, but I don’t usually see it in print.

You usually hear it, right?

Right, unless it’s somebody who’s writing folksy English in particular, you know, specifically.

But, you know, what’s also fun about these kinds of expressions is there are lots and lots of different variations of them,

Like may could or may can or may will or may shall or might woulda had oughta.

My wood head otter.

I mean, some people use that.

But I tell you what, I tell you my favorite example of this, Susan, if you, well, I feel like we’ve gotten to know each other better, so you wouldn’t mind if I sang you a few lines, would you?

Yeah, that would be fun.

Okay, and then you can sing them to your New York husband.

There’s a great song called Too Old to Cut the Mustard.

Do you know this song?

Do either of you know this song, Grant?

I do not know this song.

It’s a great song about being too old to cut the mustard, and it uses the expression used to could.

I used to could jump just like a deer, but now I need a new landing gear.

I used to could jump a picket fence, but now I’m lucky if I jump an inch.

I’m too old, too old, too old to cut the mustard anymore.

Do you think you might want to sing that to your husband, Susan?

I think I’ll pass on that one.

Okay, all right.

The Martha Barnette songbook now in stores.

Well, just to show, and actually there’s a very cool rendition of this song on YouTube that we should link to.

Oh, okay, yeah, there we go.

Get this, it features Rosemary Clooney, George’s aunt, and Marlena Dietrich singing a duet.

It’s hilarious.

Oh, how about that?

That’s an interesting combination.

Yeah, yeah.

So double modals are a dialect feature of Southern American English then, right?

That’s kind of our short story there.

Yes.

Okay, cool.

So it’s legitimate, but honestly, I wouldn’t use it in writing if you’re trying to sound really standard,

Because that’s the way you Yankees talk.

All right.

Well, Susan, thanks for giving us a call.

I hope we helped.

Yes, it was fun.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So Susan’s husband should get used to it, right?

If you have a question about language, if your spouse makes fun of something you say,

We would love to hear that story.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Brent, has this ever happened to you?

You’ve thrown away something that you’ve kept for a long time

Because you finally convinced yourself that you’re never going to use it.

And then the very next day, it turns out it’s exactly the thing you need.

You know what I’m talking about.

It happened to me recently with a computer cable, and I was just kicking myself.

I felt it had taken up space long enough in my desk drawer, and sure enough, the next day I needed it.

We know on our discussion forum at waywordradio.org, people have been discussing this phenomenon as well,

And they came up with a couple of pretty good terms for it, although I wonder if our listeners have more of them.

One of them was schadenfreude.

Nice, nice.

Kind of sadness about that.

And the other one I kind of liked was premature evacuation.

Well, maybe you have a better suggestion for what we should call the act of throwing something away and then finding out you need it the next day.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is sponsored in part by iUniverse, supported self-publishing.

Is there a book in you?

Find out how to publish it at 1-800-AUTHORS or learn more online at iUniverse.com.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

It’s time for our slang quiz, and today’s contestant is an expert on the history of the English language.

Jack Lynch has written on everything from the making of Samuel Johnson’s Great Dictionary

To a collection of Johnson’s sharpest insults.

He’s a professor of English at Rutgers University,

And his new book is called The Lexicographer’s Dilemma,

The Evolution of Proper English from Shakespeare to South Park.

Jack, welcome to A Way with Words.

Well, thanks for having me.

Hey, by the way, do you pronounce it evolution or evolution?

I tend to go with evolution, but that’s because I spent some years in England,

And it’s a little more common there.

Okay. All right.

But I’m easy.

Yeah.

Well, Jack, you know, we always ask our contestants about their favorite slang term,

And I imagine for you this would be like being asked to choose a favorite child.

But I wonder if you had one favorite slang term to offer us from any century, what would it be?

Well, I like slang when it’s new and fresh, but the problem is by the time people have heard of it,

It tends to be just cliché.

So for a while I was very fond of fail and win in their new senses,

Though they’re probably becoming clichés.

So that means I usually go back to old-fashioned ones like copacetic or brumagem or something like that.

They were cliched and have long since been forgotten.

Okay, brumagem meaning junk, right?

Brumagem meaning fake, inferior, shoddy.

Right, right. From Birmingham, right?

That’s it.

Originally, yeah.

Well, Jack, say hello to Grant.

Hiya, Jack.

How are you?

All right, you ready to do this thing?

Oh, probably not.

You’re threatening to reveal me as the fraud I really am.

All right.

Yeah, we’re going to make sure every one of your students hears this quiz.

It’s really easy.

Here’s what’s going to happen.

I’m going to describe something to you, and it’s going to use a slang term.

Then I’m going to give you three choices of what that slang term might mean,

And your job is to pick one.

Martha can help if you need it, all right?

Here we go.

If the chief technology officer of a major corporation says that she wants one throat to choke,

Does she mean A, she wants a personal assistant who answers only to her,

B, she wants to route all of the company’s internet traffic through a single connection,

Or C, she wants to deal only with one vendor in solving a particular problem.

One throat to choke.

One throat to choke.

Isn’t there someone who wanted the entire people to be one so he could chop off one head,

But I’m afraid that doesn’t work there.

I’m just going to have to guess since I have no idea.

Let’s go with the first one, the one assistant.

I have no confidence in the answer whatsoever.

Well, unfortunately, the answer is C.

The CTO of this company, she wanted one vendor so she could blame one person.

It’s kind of a positive way of looking at putting all of your eggs in one basket.

If you have one person to blame, it’s a heck of a lot easier when things go wrong.

Okay, I’ll buy that.

All right, we’ve got two more questions for you.

Let’s go on to number two.

Your co-worker comes in one morning recounting a long story about his Friday night out on the town.

He keeps saying the word pickleback, P-I-C-K-L-E-B-A-C-K.

What is he talking about?

Is a pickleback, A, the position played by a Polish soccer player he snogged in a bar?

Is it, B, a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser?

Or is it, C, the scrap of paper on which he wrote all the phone numbers of all the ladies he met at a party?

Oh, another one I’ve never heard of.

What is a pickleback?

Makes me wish I worked in a place where my colleagues came in and talked about picklebacks.

I have no idea whatsoever.

Any hints?

Any guesses?

Do you have a coin there, Jack?

I don’t have a three-sided coin.

Let’s just run through these options again.

What is a pickleback?

Is it A, the position played by a Polish soccer player?

Is it B, a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser?

Or is it C, the scrap of paper on which someone writes all the phone numbers of the ladies that they meet?

Well, the second one probably sounds the most linguistically plausible,

But I know that’s what you’d be making up just to trick me.

So I think I’m still going to guess that again with no confidence whatsoever.

Yeah, but what you’re forgetting in your calculations is that basically I’m a nice guy.

I don’t want to deceive you too much.

It is B. As a matter of fact, a pickleback is a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser.

I swear they’re drinking it in New York.

See, the reason I didn’t want to guess that is because it horrifies me to think that people do that.

I don’t know that I want to live in such a world.

All right.

Here we go to number three.

Let’s see how you do on this.

So you’re at 50%.

Let’s see if you can get two out of three.

Your wife says she doesn’t like her step-ins.

What does she mean, step-ins?

Are Step-ins A, visitors who drop by without calling ahead,

B, underpants, or C, the in-laws of her in-laws.

Wow.

I can’t say I’ve ever thought of any of those categories before.

He’s never considered underpants.

Consider the underpants.

He goes commando. He’s a modern man.

Oh, dear. Again, this is completely out of my ken.

But I’m going to guess C and see what happens.

Oh, unfortunately, C was my little joke.

Yeah, see, there you go.

Because the in-laws of your in-laws are your family.

Well, you can keep going with a chain of in-laws.

That’s true. That’s true.

Step-ins are underpants, particularly like the larger underpants

Rather than the little tiny Brazilian things.

Although more common these days and certainly more current,

Step-ins usually are shoes, just, you know, slip-on shoes.

Well, had you offered me shoes, I would have guessed shoes

Because that seemed a little more obvious.

But no, I’m afraid you got me.

Okay, well, you know, I’ve got to say, though,

I’m more pleased to have you play than I am to have beat you.

Well, next time I will be quietly Googling as we do these things.

And I’m going to say, don’t ever quiz me about the Johnsonalia

That you’re an expert in because I will fail everything.

I will fail miserably.

Thank you so much, Jack, for being a great support.

Well, thanks very much for having me.

And if you have a question about the English language, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or you can always email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

And I should mention that we’ll be talking with Jack about the lexicographer’s dilemma

In a future episode of our online-only content, which you’ll find at waywordradio.org or on iTunes.

We’ll also link to Jack’s website and to his Amazon page for the book.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

My name’s Catherine Lancaster.

I’m from Westlake, Texas.

Well, hello, Catherine.

And I have a question for you.

All right.

You’re not originally from Westlake, Texas, I bet.

No, I’m originally from New Zealand, but I’ve spent half my life in Texas.

Okay.

Okay, nice amalgam.

Yeah, interesting.

I’m like 12.

No, I’m just kidding.

Well, my question today is, I was raised to say the word mum for my mother,

And when I came to America, everyone said mom.

And I never knew that word existed until I came to this country.

So upon looking in the dictionary, in my general concise Oxford dictionary,

It had both mum being British and mom just being a noun for mother.

But in the Webster Dictionary, it just says mom.

There’s no mom.

So how did we get from, or how did the Americans get from mom to mom?

Oh, sigh.

If we had a 12-hour program, I don’t think I could finish talking about this topic.

But the short version is, and this is the way I almost always explain to Catherine,

Is that the language forked.

That is, it took different paths.

And we inherited in North America, because the Canadians do it too, a different kind of vowel set than you inherited in New Zealand.

So you guys had the rascals and the scalawags and the blackguards, and we had the fine upstanding merchants and businessmen and frontiersmen, right?

No, I’m kidding.

I was going to say.

That’s right.

Feel free to defend yourself there, Catherine.

No, but generally what happens here with all language is that it’s carried by people.

It doesn’t transmit through the air like radio waves.

So we did get a different stock of immigrants here in the United States than you got in New Zealand.

And it doesn’t require a great deal of difference, but there was some.

We had far more immigrants from throughout Europe.

We had far more Irish immigrants here, I believe, than New Zealand did.

Our language that we speak today is directly related to the people who brought it over.

So we had more of something than you had or less of something than you had.

And thus, we say mom and you say mom.

But we really need to talk, Martha, don’t we, about all the words for mama.

Mama and ma and mama and mammy and mammy and mam.

Mamma, yeah.

Mamma.

There’s a ton of different variants here.

And it’s no surprise that it’s different in all these different Englishes that are spoken throughout the world just because it’s such a common word.

And common words do tend to, they tend to do two things, persist and they tend to change.

So they’re still recognizable as the thing that they used to be, but they change just a little bit.

And the vowel is the easiest place for the change to take place.

Catherine, I remember feeling a similar kind of shock, almost like a splash of cold water,

The first time I ran across mum and mummy in print when I was a little kid and I was reading Mary Poppins.

And I went to my mom and said, Mom, there’s a misspelled word in the book.

You know, the kids are calling their mother Mummy.

What is the deal?

It’s shocking when you first see it.

Well, I remember as a child having, you know, the odd American child that would be in school

And them saying the word Mom.

And, you know, at first I think I thought it was pretty cool,

But then it sort of seemed to be annoying.

Oh, really?

Because it was a different sound entirely.

And I guess just because I find mom to be a very deep sound

And mum to be a kind of a hum sound, kind of a liltish sound,

That I always kind of thought, that sounds a bit stern.

But, you know, like you say, it’s just from whence we come.

So what do you call your own mum?

Well, I call her Mom, but she was a speech therapist for many years,

And so, of course, it was either Mom or Mother.

But until I came to this country, and I have got used to it,

But I just was very curious about how we got there.

Yeah, it’s an accident of history.

You might be interested to know that there are people in New England, in the United States,

That do say Mom.

And actually, there are South Africans who do say mom.

Well, yes.

Yes.

I didn’t know South Africans would say that.

That’s right.

So there’s a difference, you know, different roots.

Like New England definitely has a different kind of historical background as far as the language that its immigrants spoke than, say, the southeast of the United States.

So you would expect to be changes there.

Thank you, Catherine, so much for your call.

It’s nice to hear that cross-cultural perspective.

Well, thank you very much for answering it for me.

And now I can let other people know why we say mom and you say mom.

It’s because of the rascals and the scallow eggs, don’t forget.

That’s right.

Don’t forget them.

Okay.

Thanks for calling, Kyle.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your questions about some difference between two kinds of Englishes.

Give us a call or drop us a line, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hey, Grant, do you know how to spell onomatopoeia?

Yes.

Just the way it sounds.

That’s terrible.

I thought you’d think so. That’s why I said it.

Send your terrible riddles to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sigrin Newell from Albany, New York.

Hi, Sigrin or Sigrid?

Sigrin with an N.

Sigrin with an N. Welcome.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, my question is, you are always talking about new words and how they come into the language,

And I recently encountered an old word that seems to me like it ought to be in the language,

And so my question is, how and why is it that old words fade out of the language,

Even when they’re perfectly acceptable and ought to be really usable words?

-huh. Well, you’ve got our curiosity piqued. What’s the word?

The word is wittle, W-I-T-T-O-L.

And tell us what it means.

It is a man who knows that his wife has a lover, and he’s okay with that.

Mm—

-huh. Why do you think he’s okay with that?

Well, for whatever reasons, he tolerates that.

He may think that she should have the same freedom that he has.

Yeah, and this word is related to the English word wit.

It has to do with knowing, right?

I presume as much.

Yeah.

So your question is, it’s not as if women aren’t still running around on their husbands, some of them, right?

Right.

So why don’t we ever hear this word? I mean, it’s probably a new word to most people.

Yeah. I was surprised. In 40 years, I’ve never encountered it in all the things I’ve read.

And it just was like, wow.

Well, where did you encounter it?

I encountered it in a book called The Artful Nuance by Rod Evans.

Mm-So it has a…

In that book, he talks about pairs of words and how they are different.

So he was pairing it with cuckold.

Okay. So it wasn’t a piece of fiction where somebody just mentioned in passing a Whittle.

And so you’re saying that this is drawing a distinction between the word cuckold,

Which is a man who may not know that his wife is having an affair,

And the fact that in the case of Whittle, he does know.

He does know, and he’s okay with that. He accepts it.

I’m browsing at the moment through some pages in Jeffrey Hughes’ Encyclopedia of Swearing.

He has a really nice entry on cuckoldry, and he talks about Wittel.

And what he suggests here is that maybe the reason the man is okay with it is because at this period in history,

A woman and her belongings were basically considered both the property of a man.

And so if a woman took a lover, she was likely to receive gifts from him of jewelry or other expensive things.

And so they actually then would belong to the husband.

So maybe the husband saw his wife as a profit source.

Oh.

So that’s why it was a 14th century medieval word.

Yeah, I do recommend Jeffrey Hughes’ book.

It’s called The Encyclopedia of Swearing.

It’s got some really nice stuff.

This is a highly academic book.

This isn’t some little guffawing, throwaway, nothing book.

It’s very sophisticated, well-researched, and has good stuff in it.

You know, one interesting thing is he also mentions elsewhere in the book

Two words for a woman who is being cheated on

And that have kind of fallen out of the language as well.

Well, one is cuckquean, right?

That’s right.

C-U-C-K-Q-U-E-A-N.

Queen meaning a woman regarded as being disreputable,

Especially a prostitute.

And then the other one is cornuta, C-O-R-N-U-T-A,

Because cornuto used to be a way of referring to a man

As being a cuckold, someone who was being cheated on.

And, of course, that’s the feminine version.

Well, the question for me is, you know, how come we stopped using these words?

Because, as you say, the behavior continues.

I was going to get around to that.

There’s certainly trends in language are not unheard of.

I think maybe we don’t read Shakespeare as closely as we used to.

It probably has a little bit to do with it.

Remember how we referred to a woman being perceived as a property of a man?

A lot of the social mores around the relationships between men and women

And the law governing those relationships.

Remember, you used to be able to be punished for adultery by the law.

You know, it was something that was handled by your local government or your church,

And it wasn’t something that was handled in the home, which is the case today.

And as these mores and these laws changed, then the need for this kind of language perhaps faded away.

And perhaps there was no need to make the distinction between someone who knew he was being cheated on and someone who didn’t know.

I see.

Well, Seguin, thank you for the interesting call.

Maybe our conversation today on the air will bring the word wittle to enrich the lives and vocabulary of people nationwide.

Thank you very much.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve run across a word that has you wondering, call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

If you’re following us on Twitter, you may remember a word that we mentioned recently.

It means the part of the back where one cannot reach to scratch.

That’s an important word, isn’t it, Grant?

Mm—

And, you know, the word is acnestis, A-C-N-E-S-T-I-S.

And I think that this would be a really handy word to have in one’s vocabulary, right?

Honey, can you put a little suntan lotion on my acnestis?

That sounds like back acne.

Never mind.

Well, you can find gems like that on our Twitter account at twitter.com slash Wayword.

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That’s our show for this week.

If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message anytime.

The number’s 1-877-929-9673.

Or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell and Jennifer Powell.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And from San Francisco, I’m Grant Barrett.

Thanks to Howard Gelman for engineering our show from the studios of KQED Radio.

Fare thee well.

Adios.